


In With the Old

by istia



Series: In With the Old [1]
Category: The Professionals
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, M/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-26
Updated: 2006-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-02 06:11:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3393
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/istia/pseuds/istia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Breaking up is hard to do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In With the Old

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2000, but first published in Sep 2006.

"So, that's it."

I watched as he methodically folded his clothes into a bag sitting on the bed. My side of the bed, at that; closest to the wardrobe. Bile fizzed in my stomach. I swallowed, hard, but it didn't help.

"Just like that, it's over. That it, mate? Put a new twist on a tried and true formula, have you? It's out with the new and in with the old, is it?" I tried a laugh; it came out a croak, unnerving me.

Bitterness burned the back of my throat, like acid roiling up from the pit of my aching stomach. I pressed my lips together, hands clenched against the galling, chilling impotence. No one in my adult life had ever had the power to make me feel this helpless and impotent, except him. That I'd gone into it with my eyes open, that I'd known from the start it had little chance of working...but, no, that wasn't the hell true.

I'd thought there was a chance: of course I had. Only a masochist would've gone into it otherwise. I couldn't possibly have thrown myself so totally into this fucking affair without believing, in at least some tiny reservoir of naivete surviving amongst the cynical flint, there was a chance I could make him--

I swallowed as I watched his spare movements, his knife-sharp grace and economy, even in the mundane activity of folding clothes into a bag, accentuating the twisting pain in my gut.

Yeah, like a wide-eyed yokel, I'd gone in convinced he'd see everything I was offering, how goddamned good it could be; that he'd come round to seeing I had on offer everything he could ever need or want. I'd thought I could _make_ him care about me in return just by showing him, every way I could think of, what it could be like. I drenched him with the taste of conviction, the heat of passion, the smell, the visceral realness of it like a spray of arterial blood. The power of all that feeling fucking had to mean something, to have some power to transform, to affect his emotions in turn--or at least to matter a bleeding jot. Didn't it? How could such a deep well of feelings have no more power to quench his thirst than a mirage offers a dehydrated man?

He brushed past me into the bog and came back in moments with his shaving kit, stowing it with efficient speed in the bag before zipping it.

"You're off, then." I centred myself in the bedroom doorway as he straightened with one small holdall in each hand. I looked at each bag in turn with deliberate emphasis before lifting my eyes to his face. "Didn't take long to clean yourself out of my life, did it? But, then, you've only been virtually living here for three months. How much clutter can a person gather in one place, after all?"

Not even a quirk of his set mouth or his usually mobile eyebrows acknowledged either the irony or the bitterness. He met my stare with flat eyes, chiselled face emotionless as a white marble frieze. But I'd lived with him for three months and been drawn to him for far longer: his eyes, midnight blue in the lamp's glow, were flecked with pain like mica, tells he'd never own to of fracture points in the stone.

A mean part of me, the part that didn't want to deal with the hurt at the root of my fury, was glad.

I stared at him, not shifting. Challenging him, which isn't something most people would consider sensible--but he was leaving me, so I felt reckless and uncaring of anything more he could do. I waited for him to manhandle me out of his way or to say something unforgivably banal--like _I'm sorry_; like _We'll still be mates_; like, fuck it! _Thanks_\--that would make it easier for me to let him go. Silence stretched in the frozen tableau. His eyes didn't waver, looking at me hard and long, but I knew they weren't really seeing me. Not any more.

If they ever had.

"Three months living with me and two months before that having it off," I said, breaking first, goaded into heat, "and you'll just go without a bleeding word? You've nothing to say to me at all?"

His eyes sharpened on me--seeing _me_\--for the first time since he'd come home, grim and broody, and I'd seen the change in him...since he'd said he was leaving. I'd known where, and why, without the details he wasn't inclined to share. Expected it, hadn't I? Always known, at heart.

My voice grated like ground glass in my mouth. "Means nothing at all, does it, five bloody months? He just crooks his little finger and you go to heel. It's like a bloody reflex. You'll snuffle up the crumbs he flings you--even if it means slurping them up from the floor at his feet--rather than share a banquet with me." Still no word, no change in his steady, cool gaze or outward stolidity. "I can't even blame you. How do you blame the river for flowing to the sea?"

Nothing broke the silence thick as a pea-souper, not a movement, not even a flicker of his dark lashes. I knew it was useless, over, done. Standing there blocking him in the hope of some kind of acknowledgement was beyond futile and edging towards being fucking pathetic. My wants and feelings had seared to ashes and blown off his fingers the moment a hot gaze fixed itself back on him. But it was true, what I'd said. He was the victim here. Strong, smart, tough, capable, independent: except with one person.

Vicious anger flushed heat along my nerves that that one person wasn't me because I at least trusted myself to care about him as much as myself.

Just before I broke in concession and moved from the doorway, he spoke. Eyes meshing with mine with a calm steadiness of purpose, his look was as simple and direct as his words: "He needs me."

He tucked the holdall in his right hand under his left arm, then lifted his hand towards my face. I froze, time and movement slowing like congealing jelly, and waited with prickling skin for the brush of his fingers. _The last time_, I thought, _this is the last time he'll ever touch me like someone he cares about_, and bittersweet yearning raised the hairs on my arms.

I braced to grab and hold onto this final touch, encase it, with due bleeding pathos, in a crystal vial of memory, the sole memento of an affair gone to dust. One final touch from blunt, strong, tender fingers; a last spark of his essence branding my flesh. This was it, this was all I'd ever have of the relationship I'd fought to shape into the most vital in both our lives.

An inch from my cheek, so close I could smell the gun oil residue under the scent of the rest room soap, his hand paused, then fell to his side.

"I need him."

The calm certitude in his voice echoed as I stepped back into the hallway to let him pass. I wasn't even to have that much, then; not even a final touch. He moved past me, focused and contained. The front door clicked shut behind him and I was alone with only a lingering hint of his scent too elusive to encase in memory. It would fade, it would all fade, it would all soon mean nothing to anyone but me.

And I turned away from the blank panels of the door and into the living room, dropping onto the sofa, numb and hurting at once and weak with it, weak, not even the anger shoring me up sufficiently. I was Andy Pandy with my strings cut while the golliwog ran away with the moon.

:::::::

I didn't see him for a week. I had the next day off and spent it in a fury of activity that included washing the bed linen, all of it, mattress pad to quilt and everything between. Discovered the need when driven to the sofa in the middle of the night, unable to settle on the empty plain of the bed. We'd made love two nights before; clean and simple acts, as it happened, but the memories seemed imprinted into the cotton along with the spice of his arousal.

"Made love"? Had sex, more like. Might as well put the right label on matters now the odd, attenuated affair had been dealt its death-blow.

He'd closed his eyes every time he kissed me. He wouldn't kiss me at all the first couple of weeks we were having it off. I pushed for it, determined to have that intimacy at least, and felt a minor satisfaction when he gave in. Through all our months together, though, I was the one who initiated our kissing. Every fucking time. And he shut his eyes every time. I used to open mine, morbidly checking. I'd tried to ignore the mocking voice deep inside that said he was pretending he was kissing someone else. _He knows it's me_, I'd insist back at myself. He must bloody well know it's me.

After all, he wouldn't have held back so much if he'd been able to convince himself it was somebody else, would he?

Impatient with the futile bitterness, I avoided contact with him at work, staying out of the rest room, going to briefings at the last moment and standing at the back, holing up in Files, God help me, in downtime. I volunteered on the second day for a solo op, a low-grade stake out, tediously boring, but a relief to be spared the possibility of coming face to face with him...with the two of them. Together.

Spared, too, the sidewise looks and curiously commiserative speculation that flowed from some of my fellow agents. I avoided them as well, sticking to the girls in the typing pool for diversion during pub lunches and after-work drinks. The girls were touchingly sensitive. No one ever hinted at the subject directly, but they regaled me with--mostly comic--stories from their own experiences and got on with the job of jollying me out of my apparently poorly hidden dumps, standing me drinks and making sure I got home all right afterwards. It would've been hilarious if it weren't me being so frigging ludicrous.

But it helped in getting back on the old even keel. When the stake out fizzled and I was called back to HQ, the fury was in bondage, regret had been booted into the corner, and I could stand being in the same room with them.

They were in the rest room when I went in after a briefing with Cowley and a couple of new agents I was to baby-sit through their first week on the squad. I stopped short in the doorway on seeing them and Perkins bumped into me; he muttered an apology I heard hazily, with a sliver of attention. The rest was focused on the two men across the room as I moved inside by rote.

Doyle was leaning on one elbow against the wall beside the bulletin board, fine-boned hand threaded through rumpled curls. One long slim leg was planted firmly, the other bent to the side, hip canted, trainer-encased foot tapping. He was reading something indistinguishably in a low growl of a voice. His partner stood close by his side, slightly behind him. On an indistinct, snarled comment from Doyle, Bodie's larger, more solid figure leaned closer, peering at the notice board over the broad but thin-fleshed shoulder in front of him.

As natural as breathing, the hand that wouldn't give me a final touch on that last evening in my flat fitted itself against the small of Doyle's back as though it belonged.

I studied it as I settled with a cup of tea, unable to drag my eyes away.

He never fucked me, not once during our time together. It was the only barrier I hadn't been able to breach. He'd acquiesced in everything else I'd initiated, even, at last, kissing; but he wouldn't fuck me. He had no problem about being fucked: He'd spread his legs and offered his arse to me with casual pleasure. He'd enjoyed it, and I enjoyed it, but when I wanted to return the pleasure, he refused. No big deal; he just shrugged and said it wasn't necessary. After a few weeks, when I was feeling cautiously confident, I tried insisting, tried asking for it for my sake, not his. I asked until I was close to bleeding wanton, in danger of losing every scrap of pride I had.

Yet I continued courting denial, bulling my way along the worn path until tension like an icy miasma rose between us. His eyes had turned steely with boredom, face smoothing into that damned unreadable remoteness as he shut himself off from me. Only then, teetering on the edge, did I haul back on the halyard of my temper and stop trying to force him.

Our sex was good. Whatever we did, hard or gentle, long and slow or hot and fast and sticky, it took us both to repletion every damned time. That he wouldn't fuck me--not even once, just to see how it might be--wasn't a big deal: unless I insisted on it. I wasn't deluded enough not to know I'd lose any battle of wills I forced--though, during the cautious, heady progression of those five months together, I'd chosen blindness over acknowledgement of the real reason I'd always lose.

I'd pretended all it needed to sort things out was time. He liked to be fucked. One day, he'd get over whatever hang-up he had and would want to fuck me, too; would frigging realise how doing me would be as brilliant as me doing him. It was inevitable. All he needed was time and the room to get used to the idea without being shoved to it.

In the quiet aftermath of my frustrated attempts to force the issue, I'd sometimes wondered where that hang-up came from. Most men I'd known who enjoyed sex with other men tended to have more problems with being fucked than fucking. Yet Bodie, all barbed-wire machismo wrapped in black leather and none of it only show, didn't have image-problems from taking a cock up his arse. The only problem he had was in not wanting to do the same to me.

My resentment at failing to bring Bodie round to my view and his keeping mum on whatever reasons he had sometimes found an outlet in blaming Doyle, as so much concerning Bodie inevitably involves Doyle. Their on-and-off affair had threaded through the years of their partnership, the most studiously ignored, common-knowledge secret in CI5's classified, if seedy, halls. I didn't know exactly when it started between them, sometime during the three years before I joined the squad, and didn't give a bugger's hoot. I cared only that it was off when I made my move on Bodie.

I'd reckoned Doyle was kaput, that Bodie's moving in with me put Doyle right out of the picture. Sometimes, though, lying in the dark with Bodie's soft snoring and warm bulk beside me, I'd wondered if Doyle hadn't left a brand behind, mapped his desires like an invisible tattoo onto Bodie's pale, hard flesh. I imagined the enigmatic, sexy, older Doyle having bent Bodie somehow. Forced him into the submissive role, perhaps. Made him learn to like being fucked but never let him get off on doing it. Doyle had had him to use and shape for years before I first met the appreciative gleam in Bodie's eyes after he'd raked them over me at our introduction, suavely shaking my hand before turning back to his partner.

Bodie the innocent, trained by his Machiavellian partner to service Doyle's selfish sexual desires! The absurdity alone should've alerted me to the depths of my bitterness, but I'd shut away self-knowledge along with all benign feelings towards Doyle.

As I sank into a chair in the rest room, my eyes stayed fixed on that splayed hand resting on Doyle's back. An innocuous enough touch, seemingly casual; yet it blared familiarity, especially in regards to prickly Doyle and his _noli me tangere_ aura. The tip of Bodie's little finger was dipped just slightly out of sight below the waistband of Doyle's jeans....

With a dizzying rush of pain, the realisation that Bodie fucked Doyle swamped me. That the ultimate intimacy of an aggressive Bodie joining his body to another belonged only to Doyle. To countless birds, too, but only to Doyle amongst men.

And Bodie's strongest emotional attachments were to men.

He hadn't cared if I'd taken him. It was...inconsequential. I could've had him every night, if our bodies had been up to it; he'd have taken the pleasure and been sated, like scoffing a bowl of trifle.

But Bodie using his sexual vigour to work magic on another body belonged to Doyle alone. Only Doyle would ever be granted the potency of an active Bodie; only Doyle knew what it felt like as Bodie worked with intent focus to subsume his partner in sensuality. For Doyle alone the feel of Bodie's tongue licking a swathe up the cleft of his arse, moistening a path Bodie's hand would follow, large blunt fingers, gentled into tenderness, gliding along his perineum, callused fingers slick and cool against his hot, tight skin, circling, then breaching his arse and stroking into the dark heart of him. Doyle's alone the sensation of the veined, slick bulk of Bodie's cock pressing inside, inch by rigid inch, melding them in a spring tide of soaring intensity. Only for Doyle to know the strength in muscular arms lifting him to his knees as Bodie's powerful hips sank his cock balls-deep, crisp dark hair prickling against Doyle's arse, the cock filling him as a large hand reached to fill itself with Doyle's cock and a deep, resonant voice murmured words I'd never hear into damp, tangled curls....

I stood, my hip knocking the cup and saucer perched on the arm of the sofa with a clatter that attracted glances. I gathered Perkins and the other babe with a curt nod and strode to the door. I struggled to control the impulse, but the instinct for self-preservation that had kept me alive in CI5 for over a year did a bunk and I slowed, gesturing for them to go ahead as I looked back into the room. A few incurious eyes watched me, but Bodie's were on Doyle. They were laughing about something now. They turned together from the bulletin board in one fluid movement, like clockwork, like a patterned dance, till they were facing the rest of the world shoulder-to-shoulder, shadows and shadowing, keystone and arch and I fled, fled, fled.


End file.
